13 ms·

Uganda is shutting down schools funded by Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates

142 points by jackgavigan 10y ago

DailyHN 10y ago
> Namusobya from ISER said she believes BIA causes segregation between the poor and rich. She said in government-run schools every child is treated equally, but BIA's model only targets the poor. Not sure that I'm seeing the problem here... since when are the rich jealous of the poors' education? And here is the bit where Gates/Zuck benefit (possibly now, certainly in the future): > You have technology -- like tablets -- often standing in place of teachers... Gates/Zuck [could] make more money selling tech to these schools (probably not through tuition, though, because it's only $6/month). [I see the benefits being long-term edu foothold, not short-term profiteering] Edit: Added edits in [].
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- jhanschoo 10y ago
  The name-dropping of Gates and Zuck helps the western reader relate to pretty domestic Ugandan news. Whereas it helps attracts views, I wonder exactly to what extent the two billionaires and their interests are involved in BIA.
- Veen 10y ago
  Doubtful. I'm not fan of Gates or Zuckerberg, but they can invest their money with a much higher return than is likely to be achieved in the Ugandan private education industry. Even people who generally do the wrong thing can do the right thing sometimes - and Gates in particular has demonstrated this. Sure, contributing to reducing malaria deaths means more potential windows users, but it's a bit of a tenuous link.
  - DailyHN 10y ago
    Are you saying that you do not see the massive opportunity that is establishing a foothold in school systems in developing countries? More specifically, Facebook owns Oculus which puts them in one of the best positions to replace schools/teachers with technology/VR.
    - DailyHN 10y ago
      Additionally, I'm not saying I disagree with Gates/Zuck. I'm sure they only have good intentions.
    - ryanlol 10y ago
      Seems like normal monitors might be a far easier solution than VR.
      - DailyHN 10y ago
        Monitors still require a physical presence in the local area(building + substantial energy source). On the other hand, a single VR device can last a student for years and it doesn't require travel to-from class.
        icebraining 10y ago
        The substantial energy source is a benefit, not a drawback. It's much easier and cheaper - and therefore faster - to power a single building than to extend the grid to every house. Remember, less than 20% of Uganda homes have electricity. As for the building, it costs $55k to build a full school in Uganda for 325 kids, complete with library and offices. Assuming it lasts for 20 years with minor repairs, that's ten cohorts of students, so 3250, which means $16 per student.
    - the_af 10y ago
      I find the thought of replacing schools and teachers with technology and VR a scary dystopia. It seems we've gone a long way... in the wrong direction, I suppose. For example, the consensus in Sci-Fi used to be the other way: people like Bradbury and Asimov imagined nightmare scenarios were kids were taught by futuristic devices, and the implication was that human contact with actual teachers mattered; that exposure to other people with different opinions -- who might even get angry at you -- was a good thing; that education is a social thing, not a mere transference of "content". Of course there's a lot to fix in education, but why would one root for an educational system in the hands of corporations and practiced by replacing everything with tech?
codingdave 10y ago
The rationale for shutting them down looks sound to me -- for-profit schools that don't meet standards, and are run by unqualified teachers.
- Veen 10y ago
  Yes, but it's not entirely clear whether those schools actually don't meet standards, or if someone in government has been "motivated" to say so by the for-profit school organization.
  - codingdave 10y ago
    True, my point was that the title is misleading -- the shutdown isn't directly related to Gates or Zuckerberg. It is not an attack on them, but a reasonable response to actual problems with the education. Whether or not those claims are true isn't something I can know just based on reading the article.
    - gvb 10y ago
      The title has two facts: 1. Uganda is shutting down a given set of schools. 2. The given set of schools are funded by Gates and Zuckerberg. The only thing that is arguably inaccurate is that the shutdown order is currently stayed until December 8.
  - sangnoir 10y ago
    > The Director of Education Standards for the Ministry, Huzaifa Mutazindwa, told CNN that the nursery and primary schools were not licensed, the teachers weren't qualified and that there was no record of its curriculum being approved. > "The Ministry does not know what is being taught in these schools which is a point of concern to (the) government," Mutazindwa said The reasons are clearly spelt out. Perhaps you have reason to think the named ministry official is lying, if so then all bets are off.
- sulam 10y ago
  It's hardly surprising that they would use rationale that makes sense, given that they need to convince a judge. This is not the same thing as their rationale being accurate. Since most HN readers are not there, it's hard to know what is really going on here. For instance, the counter-rationale, that the school threatens other schools as well as the government schools that these children would otherwise be going to also makes sense. When I'm reading a story like this, there are some immediate questions that come to mind: 1) what are the alternatives these students have and how accessible are they? 2) what are the students educational outcomes vs students who are using the alternative? 3) it seems the organization runs schools in other parts of Africa, so how are they received there? I could go on...
RubyPinch 10y ago
http://www.bridgeinternationalacademies.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Clarification-on-Bridge-Uganda-Press-Release-16.11.16-1.pdf http://www.bridgeinternationalacademies.com/wp-content/uploa...
Kenji 10y ago
Critics allege that BIA's education methods are not transparent, and that their approach is standardized and scripted. Uh, make up your mind. Either it is not transparent, or it is standardized and scripted (which means it should be very easy to obtain complete insight).
andrewclunn 10y ago
Seems so familiar to the anti school choice movement in the states. Arguing that poor kids must be forced to go to substandard public schools, under the guise of protecting the kids, while really wanting to treat education as a guaranteed money source for political actors and the teachers' union.
- tehabe 10y ago
  School choice means competition among schools. Which leads to winner and losers. So you will get bad schools. The only way to avoid this is, to have only good schools, nation wide. So that the best school is the one in your district.
  - Mathnerd314 10y ago
    > School choice means competition among schools. Which leads to winner and losers. This doesn't follow at all. Consider e.g. a company that sells different flavors of spaghetti sauce (https://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce https://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauc...). The flavors are competing, but only on a per-person basis; overall the flavors are optimized to satisfy everyone's (different) preferences. It's quite easy to imagine a similar concept in education, where people learn better from a particular teaching style or are better served by a particular curriculum. There's no obvious reason to expect that one "good" school would be sufficient for everyone's needs; the ideal situation would instead be that one could choose from several schools, of which at least one is "good".
    - tehabe 10y ago
      But spaghetti sauce can be switched for your next meal if it taste bad. A school not so much, if attended a bad school for a while you might not be able to catch up on a good school, or you have to start over again, or they don't even let you into the better school. I remember the case of private school in Germany, which failed to prepare their pupils for the final exam of the state and all students failed. After that it turned out their curriculum was wrong. The pupils paid the price for the failure of the school. The school closed and the pupils had to repeat the year.
meira 10y ago
Paying taxes would be a better social counter-part for their huge profit. Uganda government is right, imo. Let them manage education, not foreign corporations.
mrob 10y ago
>"It's very indecent because they are looking at poor people as a profitable market." --Camilla Croso I don't understand this reasoning. When there is competition, which there is here, profit means the customers are getting value from the service. They aren't being coerced into buying anything. It's not like BIA has a monopoly and the poor have no choice in the matter.
- tehabe 10y ago
  That is a naive idea. Profit means the investors are getting a value from their investment. If the customers are getting a value remains to be seen. Especially in education we are talking about years. Unlike a restaurant where you know after the first bite if you got a good service or not.
  - mrob 10y ago
    It doesn't take years to check if a child can read and write. But the main objection I have is the idea that it's automatically unethical to profit from the poor. Giving money to poor people is usually a more effective form of charity than giving goods or services, eg: http://www.givewell.org/charities/give-directly http://www.givewell.org/charities/give-directly This is using the fact that profiting from the poor is possible to help poor people efficiently. Free markets generally work better than planned economies. Why should the poor be cut off from the free market?
    - tehabe 10y ago
      To limit a good education to "It doesn't take years to check if a child can read and write." is condescending. Free markets might work for some things well, for education they don't, not in development countries nor in developed countries.
      - mseebach 10y ago
        But as long as the kids can't read and write, it's condescending to insist on western ideals of "good education", especially when you don't have a such to substitute. It's one of those times where checking your privilege isn't SJW histronics. Learning to read and write in a for-profit school >> not learning to read and write at all because nobody could figure out how to build a not-for-profit "good education" school.
jstewartmobile 10y ago
Before getting too wrapped-up in the public-private argument, consider the fact that CNN, as usual, did not interview a single student of the private schools or the public schools. They had only one quote from a parent, and they probably scraped it off of BIA's website. I would be shocked and amazed if they bothered to track down a parent and ask questions. As usual, CNN served as a mouthpiece to NGOs/bureaucrats/lobbyists/etc. who have absolutely no skin in the game as far as educational outputs go. It's not left-wing bias or right-wing bias so much as an aversion to the time and expense involved in actual reporting.
- pg_is_a_butt 10y ago
  As usual, HN commenter served as a mouthpiece for an ass. no one is watching CNN looking for news. who are you talking to? who are you trying to convince? what research did you do leading you to assume you could make any change in the world whatsoever? you're all idiots.
- jondubois 10y ago
  I think that pretty much every major corporation that exists today has become complacent/negligent like this to some extent. I have a theory: As corporations become monopolies (or become part of stable oligopolies); management becomes complacent and loses its focus on raw competence; they start to promote employees based on social connections (and popularity with peers) instead of skill - So then, actually competent employees become disillusioned with management, lose faith in the system and they get lazy. I think the workplace has become too social. Managers these days are terrible. I've worked with/for many managers as a contractor (maybe 10 in total) and out of all of them, I think there was only maybe 1 or 2 who were actually competent. I think if companies just promoted based on age, they'd do a better job overall. It's depressing to see brilliant, experienced people in their late 30s still working as low-ranking employees (under the direction of some inexperienced 20-something). Some big companies are indistinguishable from communism - People there are lazy because they know that good work doesn't get rewarded; it's the customers who end up paying through lost quality of goods and services.
  - 10y ago
vezycash 10y ago
Before anyone judges Bill and Mark, you need to understand something about African "courts." This bizarre story happened in a fairly developed town called Ikorodu in Lagos, Nigeria a few years ago. A major busy road was filled with deep, large potholes. Every year, the local government would award contracts to fix the road but nothing would get done. The owner of a gas station decided to fix the road with his own money. He bought the materials needed for the repair and stashed them by the road. However, before he could start, he received a notice to stop work along with a court summon. The court ruled that he had no right to repair the road. And that he (could) should give the money to the local government so that they would undertake the repair. Lest you think this was a black swan, the same scenario happened later in the industrial district of the area. The road (a federal road) was awful. Residents insulted the companies (PZ, UAC, Dangote...) for making money but not fixing the road. The companies therefore banded together to fix the road but the exact same nonsense happened. In conclusion, take this news with a bag of salt. (edited: fixed typos, changed white swan to black swan)
- ttrfrff 10y ago
  but... muh roads
- murphysbooks 10y ago
  Any news articles or court documents of these events?
- flaviojuvenal 10y ago
  While I completely believe this story, makes no sense to talk about "African courts" in general. AFAIK Uganda and Nigeria are countries far from each other, with different forms of government and even different ethnic groups.
  - tim333 10y ago
    There are certain similarities in culture across the sub Saharan countries though. Dunno if you've been there?
tmptmp 10y ago
Sad for the poor Ugandan kids. This sentence caught my attention: >>Uganda's High Court ruled the 63 Bridge International Academies provided unsanitary learning conditions, used unqualified teachers and were not properly licensed. However, many parents have protested and rejected the decision to close its doors. The key point here is "lincensed": totalitarian (or banana republics) and corrupt regimes have this convenient way of "licensing" to throw away anyone they don't like. These schools must learn to properly "buy" the licenses and sanitation certificates by appropriately pleasing the authorities. Disclaimer: I don't have high opinion of both Mr. MZ and Mr. BG when it comes to philanthropy given their (more so of MZ, through the internet.org) greedy and overall dishonest behaviour regarding their users, but this effort of theirs seems laudable.
- trakout 10y ago
  Quick point to add for you, Zuck has far more control over vendor lockin and hostility towards his users than Gates does at this point.
- alexro 10y ago
  >> The key point here is "lincensed": totalitarian (or banana republics) and corrupt regimes have this convenient way of "licensing" to throw away anyone they don't like. << Isn't it something they learnt from the developed countries? Never mind patent trolls
jijji 10y ago
Uganda in particular and africa in general has always been a black hole for investment. Any money not squandered will be stolen, make no mistake.
Mikeb85 10y ago
So in other words, they didn't pay off the right people? Or maybe someone else paid more? Or who knows, maybe this goes beyond simple corruption, and Uganda has made some other alliances, and wants US based NGOs out.
jarcane 10y ago
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.
- edblarney 10y ago
  Take your conspiracy theories elsewhere.
vivekd 10y ago
>While BIA has not yet evaluated the performance of their children in Uganda, in Kenya BIA found that is students "outperform their peers in public schools in basic literacy and reading." I have a hard time believing that the quality of education and sanitation is really worse in these schools than in the state run schools. Looks to me like the story here is Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg try to start up schools for Ugandan Children and other NGOs, wary of competition, lobby the government to shut them down.
cbanek 10y ago
> "You can't call it an education that Bridge is offering," Croso said. > "You have technology -- like tablets -- often standing in place of teachers and you have very scripted classes that tell the teachers exactly what to do and when -- so you don't have any sort of autonomy and you can't improvise." Sounds kind of like the American education system to me... and honestly I'm not completely sure you could call the American system of education really an education anymore. More just studying for the tests.
mikebay 10y ago
CNN is really channel, that doesn't give you any truth about subject. They do Irak war news from local parking area.. Cnn ? - no thanks
unescape 10y ago
It's not just Uganda. Education International (Brussels) tried to investigate the school and BIA had their representative arrested. Kenya has complained to the World Bank about their funding of for-profit schools to the exclusion of free public education. http://qz.com/760823/uganda-is-closing-a-for-profit-school-chain-backed-by-zuckerburg-gates-and-the-world-bank/ http://qz.com/760823/uganda-is-closing-a-for-profit-school-c... https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/06/09/the-weird-story-of-the-arrest-of-a-canadian-education-researcher-in-uganda https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/06/...
meshr 10y ago
Why waste money on something that you can’t control? Better help smart people to immigrate to the country which will care about them.

142 points by jackgavigan 10y ago

> Namusobya from ISER said she believes BIA causes segregation between the poor and rich. She said in government-run schools every child is treated equally, but BIA's model only targets the poor. Not sure that I'm seeing the problem here... since when are the rich jealous of the poors' education? And here is the bit where Gates/Zuck benefit (possibly now, certainly in the future): > You have technology -- like tablets -- often standing in place of teachers... Gates/Zuck [could] make more money selling tech to these schools (probably not through tuition, though, because it's only $6/month). [I see the benefits being long-term edu foothold, not short-term profiteering] Edit: Added edits in [].

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
jhanschoo 10y ago
The name-dropping of Gates and Zuck helps the western reader relate to pretty domestic Ugandan news. Whereas it helps attracts views, I wonder exactly to what extent the two billionaires and their interests are involved in BIA.
Veen 10y ago
Doubtful. I'm not fan of Gates or Zuckerberg, but they can invest their money with a much higher return than is likely to be achieved in the Ugandan private education industry. Even people who generally do the wrong thing can do the right thing sometimes - and Gates in particular has demonstrated this. Sure, contributing to reducing malaria deaths means more potential windows users, but it's a bit of a tenuous link.
- DailyHN 10y ago
  Are you saying that you do not see the massive opportunity that is establishing a foothold in school systems in developing countries? More specifically, Facebook owns Oculus which puts them in one of the best positions to replace schools/teachers with technology/VR.
  - DailyHN 10y ago
    Additionally, I'm not saying I disagree with Gates/Zuck. I'm sure they only have good intentions.
  - ryanlol 10y ago
    Seems like normal monitors might be a far easier solution than VR.
    - DailyHN 10y ago
      Monitors still require a physical presence in the local area(building + substantial energy source). On the other hand, a single VR device can last a student for years and it doesn't require travel to-from class.
      - icebraining 10y ago
        The substantial energy source is a benefit, not a drawback. It's much easier and cheaper - and therefore faster - to power a single building than to extend the grid to every house. Remember, less than 20% of Uganda homes have electricity. As for the building, it costs $55k to build a full school in Uganda for 325 kids, complete with library and offices. Assuming it lasts for 20 years with minor repairs, that's ten cohorts of students, so 3250, which means $16 per student.
  - the_af 10y ago
    I find the thought of replacing schools and teachers with technology and VR a scary dystopia. It seems we've gone a long way... in the wrong direction, I suppose. For example, the consensus in Sci-Fi used to be the other way: people like Bradbury and Asimov imagined nightmare scenarios were kids were taught by futuristic devices, and the implication was that human contact with actual teachers mattered; that exposure to other people with different opinions -- who might even get angry at you -- was a good thing; that education is a social thing, not a mere transference of "content". Of course there's a lot to fix in education, but why would one root for an educational system in the hands of corporations and practiced by replacing everything with tech?

codingdave 10y ago

The rationale for shutting them down looks sound to me -- for-profit schools that don't meet standards, and are run by unqualified teachers.

Veen 10y ago
Yes, but it's not entirely clear whether those schools actually don't meet standards, or if someone in government has been "motivated" to say so by the for-profit school organization.
- codingdave 10y ago
  True, my point was that the title is misleading -- the shutdown isn't directly related to Gates or Zuckerberg. It is not an attack on them, but a reasonable response to actual problems with the education. Whether or not those claims are true isn't something I can know just based on reading the article.
  - gvb 10y ago
    The title has two facts: 1. Uganda is shutting down a given set of schools. 2. The given set of schools are funded by Gates and Zuckerberg. The only thing that is arguably inaccurate is that the shutdown order is currently stayed until December 8.
- sangnoir 10y ago
  > The Director of Education Standards for the Ministry, Huzaifa Mutazindwa, told CNN that the nursery and primary schools were not licensed, the teachers weren't qualified and that there was no record of its curriculum being approved. > "The Ministry does not know what is being taught in these schools which is a point of concern to (the) government," Mutazindwa said The reasons are clearly spelt out. Perhaps you have reason to think the named ministry official is lying, if so then all bets are off.
sulam 10y ago
It's hardly surprising that they would use rationale that makes sense, given that they need to convince a judge. This is not the same thing as their rationale being accurate. Since most HN readers are not there, it's hard to know what is really going on here. For instance, the counter-rationale, that the school threatens other schools as well as the government schools that these children would otherwise be going to also makes sense. When I'm reading a story like this, there are some immediate questions that come to mind: 1) what are the alternatives these students have and how accessible are they? 2) what are the students educational outcomes vs students who are using the alternative? 3) it seems the organization runs schools in other parts of Africa, so how are they received there? I could go on...

RubyPinch 10y ago

http://www.bridgeinternationalacademies.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Clarification-on-Bridge-Uganda-Press-Release-16.11.16-1.pdf http://www.bridgeinternationalacademies.com/wp-content/uploa...

Kenji 10y ago

Critics allege that BIA's education methods are not transparent, and that their approach is standardized and scripted. Uh, make up your mind. Either it is not transparent, or it is standardized and scripted (which means it should be very easy to obtain complete insight).

andrewclunn 10y ago

Seems so familiar to the anti school choice movement in the states. Arguing that poor kids must be forced to go to substandard public schools, under the guise of protecting the kids, while really wanting to treat education as a guaranteed money source for political actors and the teachers' union.

tehabe 10y ago
School choice means competition among schools. Which leads to winner and losers. So you will get bad schools. The only way to avoid this is, to have only good schools, nation wide. So that the best school is the one in your district.
- Mathnerd314 10y ago
  > School choice means competition among schools. Which leads to winner and losers. This doesn't follow at all. Consider e.g. a company that sells different flavors of spaghetti sauce (https://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce https://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauc...). The flavors are competing, but only on a per-person basis; overall the flavors are optimized to satisfy everyone's (different) preferences. It's quite easy to imagine a similar concept in education, where people learn better from a particular teaching style or are better served by a particular curriculum. There's no obvious reason to expect that one "good" school would be sufficient for everyone's needs; the ideal situation would instead be that one could choose from several schools, of which at least one is "good".
  - tehabe 10y ago
    But spaghetti sauce can be switched for your next meal if it taste bad. A school not so much, if attended a bad school for a while you might not be able to catch up on a good school, or you have to start over again, or they don't even let you into the better school. I remember the case of private school in Germany, which failed to prepare their pupils for the final exam of the state and all students failed. After that it turned out their curriculum was wrong. The pupils paid the price for the failure of the school. The school closed and the pupils had to repeat the year.

meira 10y ago

Paying taxes would be a better social counter-part for their huge profit. Uganda government is right, imo. Let them manage education, not foreign corporations.

mrob 10y ago

>"It's very indecent because they are looking at poor people as a profitable market." --Camilla Croso I don't understand this reasoning. When there is competition, which there is here, profit means the customers are getting value from the service. They aren't being coerced into buying anything. It's not like BIA has a monopoly and the poor have no choice in the matter.

tehabe 10y ago
That is a naive idea. Profit means the investors are getting a value from their investment. If the customers are getting a value remains to be seen. Especially in education we are talking about years. Unlike a restaurant where you know after the first bite if you got a good service or not.
- mrob 10y ago
  It doesn't take years to check if a child can read and write. But the main objection I have is the idea that it's automatically unethical to profit from the poor. Giving money to poor people is usually a more effective form of charity than giving goods or services, eg: http://www.givewell.org/charities/give-directly http://www.givewell.org/charities/give-directly This is using the fact that profiting from the poor is possible to help poor people efficiently. Free markets generally work better than planned economies. Why should the poor be cut off from the free market?
  - tehabe 10y ago
    To limit a good education to "It doesn't take years to check if a child can read and write." is condescending. Free markets might work for some things well, for education they don't, not in development countries nor in developed countries.
    - mseebach 10y ago
      But as long as the kids can't read and write, it's condescending to insist on western ideals of "good education", especially when you don't have a such to substitute. It's one of those times where checking your privilege isn't SJW histronics. Learning to read and write in a for-profit school >> not learning to read and write at all because nobody could figure out how to build a not-for-profit "good education" school.

jstewartmobile 10y ago

Before getting too wrapped-up in the public-private argument, consider the fact that CNN, as usual, did not interview a single student of the private schools or the public schools. They had only one quote from a parent, and they probably scraped it off of BIA's website. I would be shocked and amazed if they bothered to track down a parent and ask questions. As usual, CNN served as a mouthpiece to NGOs/bureaucrats/lobbyists/etc. who have absolutely no skin in the game as far as educational outputs go. It's not left-wing bias or right-wing bias so much as an aversion to the time and expense involved in actual reporting.

pg_is_a_butt 10y ago
As usual, HN commenter served as a mouthpiece for an ass. no one is watching CNN looking for news. who are you talking to? who are you trying to convince? what research did you do leading you to assume you could make any change in the world whatsoever? you're all idiots.
jondubois 10y ago
I think that pretty much every major corporation that exists today has become complacent/negligent like this to some extent. I have a theory: As corporations become monopolies (or become part of stable oligopolies); management becomes complacent and loses its focus on raw competence; they start to promote employees based on social connections (and popularity with peers) instead of skill - So then, actually competent employees become disillusioned with management, lose faith in the system and they get lazy. I think the workplace has become too social. Managers these days are terrible. I've worked with/for many managers as a contractor (maybe 10 in total) and out of all of them, I think there was only maybe 1 or 2 who were actually competent. I think if companies just promoted based on age, they'd do a better job overall. It's depressing to see brilliant, experienced people in their late 30s still working as low-ranking employees (under the direction of some inexperienced 20-something). Some big companies are indistinguishable from communism - People there are lazy because they know that good work doesn't get rewarded; it's the customers who end up paying through lost quality of goods and services.
- 10y ago

vezycash 10y ago

Before anyone judges Bill and Mark, you need to understand something about African "courts." This bizarre story happened in a fairly developed town called Ikorodu in Lagos, Nigeria a few years ago. A major busy road was filled with deep, large potholes. Every year, the local government would award contracts to fix the road but nothing would get done. The owner of a gas station decided to fix the road with his own money. He bought the materials needed for the repair and stashed them by the road. However, before he could start, he received a notice to stop work along with a court summon. The court ruled that he had no right to repair the road. And that he (could) should give the money to the local government so that they would undertake the repair. Lest you think this was a black swan, the same scenario happened later in the industrial district of the area. The road (a federal road) was awful. Residents insulted the companies (PZ, UAC, Dangote...) for making money but not fixing the road. The companies therefore banded together to fix the road but the exact same nonsense happened. In conclusion, take this news with a bag of salt. (edited: fixed typos, changed white swan to black swan)

ttrfrff 10y ago
but... muh roads
murphysbooks 10y ago
Any news articles or court documents of these events?
flaviojuvenal 10y ago
While I completely believe this story, makes no sense to talk about "African courts" in general. AFAIK Uganda and Nigeria are countries far from each other, with different forms of government and even different ethnic groups.
- tim333 10y ago
  There are certain similarities in culture across the sub Saharan countries though. Dunno if you've been there?

tmptmp 10y ago

Sad for the poor Ugandan kids. This sentence caught my attention: >>Uganda's High Court ruled the 63 Bridge International Academies provided unsanitary learning conditions, used unqualified teachers and were not properly licensed. However, many parents have protested and rejected the decision to close its doors. The key point here is "lincensed": totalitarian (or banana republics) and corrupt regimes have this convenient way of "licensing" to throw away anyone they don't like. These schools must learn to properly "buy" the licenses and sanitation certificates by appropriately pleasing the authorities. Disclaimer: I don't have high opinion of both Mr. MZ and Mr. BG when it comes to philanthropy given their (more so of MZ, through the internet.org) greedy and overall dishonest behaviour regarding their users, but this effort of theirs seems laudable.

trakout 10y ago
Quick point to add for you, Zuck has far more control over vendor lockin and hostility towards his users than Gates does at this point.
alexro 10y ago
>> The key point here is "lincensed": totalitarian (or banana republics) and corrupt regimes have this convenient way of "licensing" to throw away anyone they don't like. << Isn't it something they learnt from the developed countries? Never mind patent trolls

jijji 10y ago

Uganda in particular and africa in general has always been a black hole for investment. Any money not squandered will be stolen, make no mistake.

Mikeb85 10y ago

So in other words, they didn't pay off the right people? Or maybe someone else paid more? Or who knows, maybe this goes beyond simple corruption, and Uganda has made some other alliances, and wants US based NGOs out.

jarcane 10y ago

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.

edblarney 10y ago
Take your conspiracy theories elsewhere.

vivekd 10y ago

>While BIA has not yet evaluated the performance of their children in Uganda, in Kenya BIA found that is students "outperform their peers in public schools in basic literacy and reading." I have a hard time believing that the quality of education and sanitation is really worse in these schools than in the state run schools. Looks to me like the story here is Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg try to start up schools for Ugandan Children and other NGOs, wary of competition, lobby the government to shut them down.

cbanek 10y ago

> "You can't call it an education that Bridge is offering," Croso said. > "You have technology -- like tablets -- often standing in place of teachers and you have very scripted classes that tell the teachers exactly what to do and when -- so you don't have any sort of autonomy and you can't improvise." Sounds kind of like the American education system to me... and honestly I'm not completely sure you could call the American system of education really an education anymore. More just studying for the tests.

mikebay 10y ago

CNN is really channel, that doesn't give you any truth about subject. They do Irak war news from local parking area.. Cnn ? - no thanks

unescape 10y ago

It's not just Uganda. Education International (Brussels) tried to investigate the school and BIA had their representative arrested. Kenya has complained to the World Bank about their funding of for-profit schools to the exclusion of free public education. http://qz.com/760823/uganda-is-closing-a-for-profit-school-chain-backed-by-zuckerburg-gates-and-the-world-bank/ http://qz.com/760823/uganda-is-closing-a-for-profit-school-c... https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/06/09/the-weird-story-of-the-arrest-of-a-canadian-education-researcher-in-uganda https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/06/...

meshr 10y ago

Why waste money on something that you can’t control? Better help smart people to immigrate to the country which will care about them.